Daniel Stables, author of Fiesta: A Journey Through Festivity, explores the Halloween period and its association with humanity’s propensity for mischief around the world–from dancing on car roofs in New Orleans to Japan’s festival of violence–as he considers how mischief may be fundamental to the human condition.
As the nights draw in, the suburban landscape gathers accoutrements. Ectoplasmic reams of toilet paper and polyester spider-web veils rest on the branches of the trees, now bare of their summer leaves. Mutilated pumpkins, lit from within, slowly collapse inside their porches. Skeletons rest on neighbourhood benches, their rictus grins thrust to the heavens. Cowled children move from house to house, begging.
For those of us who grew up in the West, it can be hard to look past Halloween’s superficial elements, in an age when, to most people, this is little more than a festival of commerce, capitalising on the perennial human fascination with the macabre. Yet Halloween is just one manifestation of a whole genre of festivals which make this season a fascinating period in the festival calendar: the time of mischief.
The carnivalesque suspension of society’s normal rules is a feature of festivals, but is never more in evidence than at this time of year. At no other point in the calendar is a blind eye turned so readily to the indiscriminate toilet papering of trees, egging of houses, and other such rapscallionism. In the foul swamp in which I was reared–the rural southwest England of the 1990s–such larks were confined to the wheelhouse of trick-or-treaters, and limited to Halloween night itself. Often, however, it has been the 30th October, the night before Halloween, when individuals across the Western world have felt emboldened to engage in acts ranging from light-hearted practical jokery to enthusiastically mindless violence.
Residents on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls know this occasion as ‘Cabbage Night’, named for the practice of scrumping rotten cabbages from neighbourhood gardens and delightedly hurling them through the night in a community-wide brassica fight. Across the border in Quebec, the tradition of stealing door mats led to the 30th October being known as ‘Mat Night’, while down in Detroit, the more ominously named ‘Devil’s Night’ came to be associated in the late 20th century with increasingly serious incidents of arson and violence.
For four years between 2014 and 2018, so-called Mischief Night in New Orleans (also held on October 30th) turned political, with organised parades of activists voicing their discontent around issues like racism and police brutality. The spirit was one of wilfully violent protest. “Dancing atop buildings and cars, chasing off the police with bottles for trying to arrest someone, torching someone’s four-wheeler because they recklessly drove through the crowd and could’ve killed someone, all while dancing, singing, and partying” is how one participant described proceedings to anarchist website It’s Going Down. “There’s always been a push and pull between popular ways of celebrating and ways that established powers would like us to party and parade,” said another. “Our Carnival traditions are those that actually want to ‘turn the world upside down.’”
In Lancashire in northern England, the 30th October is also known as Mischief Night, a tradition documented as far back as 1897–although then it was held on the night before May Day, and the recorded japes do not extend much further than teenagers swapping the signs around on tailors’ and grocers’ shops, and young lovers leaving shrubs and brambles beneath each other’s windows.
The modern-day inhabitants of northwest England, by contrast, take craven criminality to new heights each Mischief Night, to the extent that the Liverpool Echo was compelled in 2023 to describe it as “perhaps the most dreaded night on the calendar for families across Merseyside.” ‘Mizzy Night’, as it is known locally, sees a yearly upsurge in vandalism and violent crime, with windows bricked through, emergency workers attacked, and wheelie bins set ablaze. The damage was so bad in 2019 that it compelled then-mayor Joe Anderson to publicly decry the “feral kids” who he claimed were behind the damage. Perhaps, I would put to him, there were other forces at play–the impish sprites of the festival world, pulling the perpetrators’ strings through that night’s thin veil. Ultimately, though, Mayor Anderson chose to blame the parents.
Perhaps, however, festivals like this serve a purpose. Halloween is a tear in the Christian calendar through which zombies, ghouls, and goblins are allowed to stick their claws for a limited period of time. Halloween is an echo of the pre-Christian Celtic Otherworld festival of Samhain, and its survival may be a concession on the part of the Church to allow people to get their pagan proclivities out of their systems for the rest of the year. Maybe the same logic is at play in the tolerance of Mischief Night, trick-or-treating, and other such behaviour, usually considered transgressive but socially accepted on this one night of the year. It acts like a pressure valve, allowing people to cut loose in the hope they will be more likely to behave themselves the rest of the time.
A similar phenomenon takes place in Japan each summer. I first learned about the Abare Festival from a guide at a museum on the remote Noto Peninsula, who was showing me a collection of magnificent ceremonial paper lanterns. They were beautiful–40 feet tall, with pine-wood frames stretching windows of rice paper on which were rendered colourful scenes from Japanese mythology. These lanterns are painstakingly assembled throughout the year, with the exquisite blend of craft and artistry that characterises much of Japanese culture, only to be enthusiastically ripped to shreds during the first weekend of July. “It’s kind of a… how would you say it? A violence festival,” the guide explained with an apologetic smile.
Also known as the Fire & Violence Festival and literally translating as ‘Rampage Festival’, this event turns the usually unassuming town of Ushitsu into an arena of chaos. A parade of twelve topless local men carries the paper lanterns to the town pier. Already well sozzled on sake before they begin, they have yet more booze poured into their mouths by onlookers as they walk past. On the way, it is incumbent upon the lantern-bearers to inflict as much damage on their cargo as possible, smashing the lanterns against walls, lampposts, and the road beneath their feet, before the remains are eventually burnt on huge bonfires at the pier. The charred and battered lanterns are then taken into the town’s main shrine, where they are blessed by priests. The violence at this festival is considered an act of prayer, dedicated, as is the whole event, to the destructive deity Susanoo.
And all this in Japan–a place where saving face is paramount, and a public outburst is a shameful act. Exactly the kind of place, perhaps, which needs festivals like this the most. In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
“It sometimes happens nowadays that a gentle, sober, retiring man becomes suddenly mad, smashes plates, upturns the table, shrieks, raves, insults the whole world…”
And well he might. We all must, once in a while.
